When an image source transmits a three-dimensional (3D) image to a display device, usually two images are required to be transmitted separately. One is provided to be viewed by a viewer's left eye (left image); while the other is provided to be viewed by the viewer's right eye (right image). Through the parallax between the left eye and right eye, the viewer can perceive a 3D effect of the 3D image.
A variety of transmission formats may be used to transmit the left image and the right image from the image source (such as set-top box or computer, etc.) to the display device. One of the formats is an interlaced, or line-alternative, format. According to the interlaced format, in the 3D image, data of the left image and data of the right image are arranged in alternating lines. For example, the data of the left image is contained in lines 1, 3, 5, 7, . . . ; while the data of the right image is contained in lines 2, 4, 6, 8, . . . .
An existing two-dimensional (2D) image does not distinguish between any left image and right image, and only one 2D image is provided to be viewed by the viewer's both eyes. On the other hand, because the 3D image does distinguish between the left image and the right image, the amount of data of the 3D image is twice as much as that of the 2D image. However, to be compatible with the existing 2D image transmission formats and to use the existing 2D image transmission channels, the left and right images need to be compressed separately before being transmitted to the 3D image display device. After receiving the compressed left image and right image, the 3D image display device decompresses the left and right images, separately processes the left and right images, and displays the left image and the right image on the screen. Further, if a bicubic interpolation algorithm is used for decompression, four neighboring pixels need to be referred to determine the value of a new pixel. Thus, with the interlaced format, four lines of left image data and four lines of right image data are required separately to properly decompress the interlaced images.
The disclosed methods and systems are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.